A venn diagram of policing, mental health and criminal justice
Lesley Higginson was 72 years old when she died at her home in January 2026. The publication today of a Preventing Future Deaths report means this is the 24th PFD notice which links to the Right Care, Right Person programme and it is sufficiently similar to certain others we ve seen. Yet still we are exposing [ ]
There are a few blogs in my drafts folder, which I ve resisted publishing because they relate to frustrations I had with my former employer s approach to mental health policy and practice in policing. The topic for this post is one on which I d started drafting thoughts a couple of times but only after today did [ ]
The latest annual publication from the Independent Office for Police Conduct is just out, covering their Deaths during or following police custody or contact for 2025/6 and you can find all the other IOPC reports for previous years on one of my resources pages. Across the five categories of deaths counted by the IOPC, [ ]
The latest PFD to mention Right Care, Right Person was published this week, after the death of Catherine Morgan in Kent in September 2024. The PFD is primarily about the Metropolitan Police, however, as Catherine went missing from a south London mental health before travelling to Dover where she died by suicide as police officers [ ]
One particular canard from this week s news of Axel Rudabukana s (AR) transfer from Belmarsh to Broadmoor is the question of whether he s entitled to benefits once in hospital. I didn t realise this was such a difficult issue for some and I especially didn t realise how deeply some would double down after it was explained to [ ]
It was publicly reported yesterday that Axel Rudakubana, who killed three little girls in Southport in 2024 and serious injured countless more, has been transferred from Belmarsh prison in London, to Broadmoor hospital in Berkshire, which is one of the UK s four high secure hospitals along with Rampton (Nottinghamshire), Ashworth (Merseyside) and Carstairs (Scotland). This transfer [ ]
If we are going to talk about deaths after police contact and I think we should then at some stage we are going to have to define what they are. Some have tried the current stuff on this is not great, and for a few different reasons we might need to think [ ]
I d love to read the equality impact assessments for Right Care, Right Person if there is one. I know some forces don t have one, others do and it must be fascinating to contemplate it. The programme, as I ve covered many times on here, is predicated on the idea of taking an area of social [ ]
As the Mental Health Bill 2025 came in to being after the Mental Health Act review, there was discussion about whether the MHA principles found in the Code of Practice to the Act should be moved in to the Act itself. The Mental Capacity Act s guiding principles are statutory, in s1(1) MCA and that was [ ]
Where can section 136 Mental Health Act 1983 be exercised in shared areas of dwellings? a new Preventing Future Deaths report has raised this question after a Coroner stated officers did not understand that their powers under section 136 MHA 1980 applied to persons in a communal space within private accommodation. Let s get the [ ]